An Open Letter
I was four when my world crashed down. My father, manager to the Iyer estate, lost his life in a car crash and being the only daughter of a single father I was left all alone to fend for myself.
At eight, when my world hadn't even begun I watched it end. Shuffled from one foster home to the other and then further dumped into an orphanage I was growing up to be a vengeful kid. Too hateful at the world. Too angry at myself, at my fate. And then did Indira Iyer come in.
I hadn't known much then. All I had known was that the lady in front me me was an influential figure. Dressed in a white silk saree, her tresses bound in a tight knot at the top of her head and a simple pearl necklace. She was an enigma.
And I remember my eight year old self looking upto her in awe.
"I have a granddaughter your age. Will you be her companion?"
Two sentences that changed my life forever.
Mrs. Indira Iyer didn't demand that I follow her. Neither did she demand for me to be handed over to her. She had requested. And that was the nicest thing. The nicest thing anyone had done for me in a long time.
"Why?" I remember asking her.
She smiled.
"Because Ishita needs you," she had said.
"Ishita?" I had asked.
And her eyes twinked with joy and hope.
"Ishita," she smiled and I remember smiling back her.
Ishita, what a lucky girl, I had thought.
If only I were to have known how wrong I was.
And for the hours I had spent fantasizing about a certain Ishita, what I saw made no justice at all.
Ishita.
Ishita was a pale five year old girl hooked to IV's in an ICU.
She was no princess I made myself believe.
She wasn't even a child - she was a skeleton.
A living skeleton who was losing grip on life every passing day.
And as horrible as it sounds, I found myself envying her.
Envying the child whose family never gave up on her.
Whose brother was more of an overprotective father.
Who's sister shielded her life a bodyguard.
Who's family loved her unconditionally.
She was the one losing and no one gave up on her and neither did they let anyone give up on her.
The girl hooked to IV's in a white washed hospital room that stenched of medicines had all that I wanted in life.
And maybe we exchanged fates that fateful night.
Maybe something changed that night, because Ishita had started showing signs of improvement.
But the Ishita that returned home wasn't the Ishita that left.
"How will you tell your youngest daughter that she will never be able to conceive on her own? That there are chances that she could never be a mother at all," wept a younger Madhavi Iyer, her back faced to her husband and to me that night I headed to their quarters to return the home videos I had borrowed of Ishita.
"Madhu, she is our daughter. She will find a way. And your God, he listens right? Focus on the positives. There are .01% chances of anything of that sort happening," her husband had tried pacifying her.
"You're not a mother, Vishwa. A mother's heart. You will never understand. Every little thing that seems nothing to you, means a world to me. You weigh your opinions in probabilities and chances and I weigh mine in fear and love. What will happen to our daughter then,"
"Our daughter will be just like you," he had said, "She'll be a fussy nerve wreck of a mother and her poor husband, like me, will worry over how to calm her down and tell her that everything will would be okay. Happiness and joy passes, and so will sadness and tears. Let's live past this moment," said Ishita's old man as he buried his face in the crook of his wife's neck.
An eight year old me didn't get the depth of those words then.
All that mattered was sthat Ishita was coming home.
The Iyer princess was returning to her castle.
And return she did, but the girl who returned wasn't the happy kid who left home.
The girl who returned home was a traumatised six year old too afraid of the world. The girl who had a bucket list to complete and achievements to achieve.
What returned home was a serious Ishita who took life way too seriously for her age.
Who had her whole life planned out for her.
Ishita Iyer was an ice princess.
She lived life on her own terms.
She wasn't nice. Heck, she wasn't even human.
She was cold as snow and frigid as ice.
But she wasn't rude.
Ishita Iyer wasn't people friendly.
She was nice but if she didn't like you, she wouldn't tolerate you.
And in the years that I got to know her, never did Ishita Iyer use her family power and influence to her benefit.
"Because people leave, everyone leaves. You will leave too. So, why pretend you care when you don't. Why waste time on the how to's and when to's on all the could be and would be's. All we have is now. We need to live. You never know when it ends," was what a nine year old Ishita told her younger sibling when a bitterly weeping Mihika's father showed the first signs of infidelity.
And storms came by and winds threatened to blow the roof off the Iyer house but things remained the same.
Indira Iyer and iron grip which held her family together.
Madhavi and Vishwanathan Iyer's love.
Mihika and Vandita's rendezvous.
Vishwa and Ishita's bond.
And the acceptance which I was subjected to.
The Iyer family stood as one big family - a budding example to the Iyer community.
And they say it takes a guy to change everything.
It took a guy to destroy the mere foundation of what everything was based on.
Ishita was nine when her parents found out about Vandita's fling with Balachandran Reddy. Bala was a middle class, Tamil boy with big dreams in his eyes and a soft yet ethical heart which he had readily donated to Vandita Iyer - the Iyer family's bandit queen.
Ishita and Vandita were like chalk and cheese.
If Ishita was Miss goody two shoes, Vandita was the hippie.
Vandita knew exactly how to have fun while Ishita cared too much of how she was perceived to be.
"I don't want to be an embarrassment to the people who love me. I owe myself more than that," she had said.
Maybe that was the beginning of her down fall.
And the fact that Vishwanathan Iyer was the ideal father, the one who let his kids make their own mistakes and learn from them.
Vishwanathan Iyer, as explained by his younger son-in-law, is a self righteous man who stood by his own values and on his own terms. He was the one who valued his self respect and his loved ones more. He held no qualms or views towards the society as long as his family was happy. He was a stubborn old man who loved his family deeply. An Iyer father who's daughters loved him unconditionally and who was both loved and chastised by his wife. 'Appa' - the role model.
When the reverse psychology on parenthood worked wonders on Vandita, it backfired on Ishita.
Vandita found herself grounding up. Her fling turning into a relationship and relationship heading towards marriage which no one approved of. No one, but her parents.
And Ishita?
Ishita befriended her jiju's bhai who was six to seven years older to her.
Ishita grew to be the apple of Bala's eye.
When free one would find her with her jiju, smiling and plotting over plans on how to annoy her Akka.
Such was their bond, often mock envied by Vandita and ill talked by the society.
But what more would Vandita want but her future husband to love her kiddo, naive and stupid little sister unconditionally.
For Vandita who had perfected the art of makeup, Bala who was older than his fiance and Ishita who apparently refused to grow any taller -one would mistake them to be a family unit and Bala would happily play along.
Their game of house where one could hear Bala refer to Ishita as his 'beti' and Ishita hug him calling him Juju.
Maybe Bala's brother hung out with them to prevent Ishita from being the third wheel, or maybe there was more to it.
Maybe it was this huge misunderstanding.
Maybe it was nothing at all.
Time flew.
Bala changed Ishita to be happier.
And somewhere in that time frame Vishwa married the girl he was betrothed to since the moment he was born.
Kajal, Vishwa's wife, was an orphan brought up with traditional Iyer values. She was a staunch vegetarian. The homemaker. The perfect bahu, beti and wife.
Vishwa, introduced Kajal to Ishita on the pretext of being his girlfriend.
How scared had they been of her impending approval or disapproval only to have Ishita love Kajal at first glance.
A few cups of coffee later, were they as thick as thieves.
The tables soon turned on Kajal who had been tricked by her to be in-laws that they needed Ishita to believe that Kajal was truly Vishwa's girlfriend and not his fiance. While double agent Ishita giggled and executed her plan to give her only bhabhi the marriage of her life time.
An adolescent Ishita once again proved that she had the whole clan at her fingertips.
Maybe that was her downfall.
Ishita, no matter how shrewd she portrayed herself to be was a naive little fool. A fool lead by emotions and life.
So when Bala's mother plotted against her, Ishita fell right into the trap and I watched her do so.
It wasn't that it was exciting or rude.
To me this was a fairy tale and like every other viewer in the audience I was just too eager to watch it play out rather than placing my cards on table.
Maybe I shouldn't have done that.
Because a nine year old Ishita's seventeen years old brother-in-law caught fancy in her. What was innocent friendship to her was infatuated lust to him. Probably his first love.
And Ishita didn't even realise it as she feel deeper into the trap placed by Devyani Reddy because as virtuous and lawful as Bala was, equally vile and vindictive was the woman who gave birth to him. And inversely proportional to that were his father's balls. And proportional to those were Subramanian Reddy's brains when it came to Ishita.
The plan played as perfectly as she wanted it to. Ishita insecure nature and soft corner of Subbu and his so called love for her lead to everyone believing them to be the perfect couple - Ishita herself.
The Iyer house was at it best.
Breakfast would be served with a giggling Kajal and grinning Ishita.
Vishwa would be sent off to work by his favourite girls.
Vandita was now married to Bala.
And Kajal was now a budding fashion designer married to politician.
Ishita? Ishita was still the high school kid debating on career choices.
Ishita was eighteen when the political controversies affected the Iyer house.
When Vishwa was begged to give up politics.
When Kajal's life was claimed by a stampede.
When everything went wrong.
"Be happy. Be a family. Baby, be happy." she had said on her death bed.
And happy was what Ishita had chosen to be.
When months later her alliance was fixed to Subramanian Reddy.
When the ambitious Ishita put behind her dreams and put forth herself for her family.
I remember no one asking her if she wanted to go through it.
Everyone had just assumed that she wanted the marriage just because she was 'dating' the guy.
There had be no fancy proposals.
No surprises and no one going down on his knees.
There just had been a marriage designed to make the worries go away.
And there was Ishita.
"You don't have to do everything you like," she had said when asked about her wedding.
And the Ishita who focussed on herself till date now focussed on her impending nuptials.
I still remember her striking days off with a sigh.
Of her convincing herself that she loved the guy and that it would be okay.
And him?
And him organizing everything.
If there was more excited than Ishita for her nuptials, it was her fiance.
The guy was a Jack in the box who couldn't stand straight for a second.
While his friends teased him about ending his life long celibacy, he smiled, blushed and said that he was just marrying the girl he loved.
And Ishita? Minus the uncertainty and forgotten dreams, Ishita was the radiant bride who couldn't keep the grin off her face.
Such is the beauty of childhood lovers.
And ironically they are as fragile as they are beautiful.
Ishita Iyer was announced to be the face of "Meri Maa" a few weeks ago and it has resulted in nothing but mostly negative criticism and publicity. With the mass media doling her out to be this trophy wife, the media dubbing themselves in various voices, the aam admi loving her for being the virtuos role model, the social circles praising her for being the epitome of perfection and a small majority of the public masses criticizing Ishita to be 'celebrity fake with a degree she clearly didn't earn who is now using her daughter to get her two minutes of fame'. Which is disgusting.
This is not me clarifying anything. But there is more to Ishita Iyer than the 'Barbie' the media dubs to be.
To be continued..
I penned this out last night. And now that I started penning an update to Meherbaan this is like the background of what happened that was kind of forgotten. I myself have forgotten this so can't expect anyone to remember this.
The main reason I started writing this was to get over the Meherbaan block.
I don't expect anything from this. Just a brush up.
We're going on an update spree tonight after which I get back to studies.
ADD PM ACCOUNT. THERE WILL BE PM'S.
Edited by AraBearxx - 10 years ago
Anupamaa
10